17/10/2008

From the Feuilletons

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Milan Kundera affair

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.10.2008

"The book of betrayal under Communism has just gained another chapter," reports Karl-Peter Schwarz. "In March 1950, as a student in Prague, the writer Milan Kundera informed on an anti-Communist resistance activist. The victim, 22-year-old Miroslav Dvoracek was subsequently arrested and sentenced to 22-years in prison. The State prosecutor at the time demanded the death sentence for espionage." The young Czech historian, Adam Hradilek of Ustr, who discovered the police report containing Kundera's, gives a detailed account of the affair in the magazine Respekt. The Slovakian internet magazine Salon then published an English translation of the report. The article reads like a sinister novel about love, betrayal, freedom, Communism, heroism and failure. The commentary, by Respekt editor-in-chief, Martin Simecka, is also available in English here. Read the full story in English at the New York Times.

Die Welt 17.10.2008

In the Milan Kundera affair Hans-Jörg Schmidt reports on a witness, literary historian Zdenek Pesat, whose testimony could exonerate the great Czech writer. According to Pesat, it was not Kundera who betrayed the western agent, but Miroslav Dlask, the man originally suspected of the denunciation. "Dlask, Pesat says, personally confided in him about betraying Miroslav Dvoracek to the police. ... Pesat's testimony is music to the ears of people in Prague who, since the affair came to light, have been fighting to save Kundera's name, preparing a case against the Ustr bureau of investigation, for using dirty methods. Ustr, however, is sticking to its story."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 11.10.2008

At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the guest country Turkey is celebrating its diversity under the motto "Turkey in all its colours". Günter Seufert is pleased to be able to report that the country is showing signs of pluralisation. "Slowly but surely change is taking place. In the 90s conservative intellectuals discovered the 'multicultural heritage' of the Ottoman period, and secular thinkers started to postulate on a 'second republic', which would overcome the teething problems of nationalism such as forced egalitarianism and authoritarianism. Terms such as democracy, rule of law and human rights, state citizenship and cultural and religious freedom are seeing increased currency. For the first time, people are thinking about the political ideal of diversity in Turkey, which offers everyone space to breathe."

Kurdish-Turkish authorMurathan Mungan describes how east-west polarisation affects his reception as a writer: "Writers from Turkey who are looking to establish a readership in the west, are alone, shadowless. Western readers have no sense of the past, the cultural heritage of these writers. The societal and historical references are foreign to them, as are the shadows of the old masters."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 13.10.2008

Beat Stauffer traces the history of slavery in the Islamic world, a subject of long-standing taboo and which, only now, is being researched by anthropologist Malek Chebel. "The clear emancipatory tendencies that characterised the beginnings of Islam could not sustain themselves through the following centuries, and instead made way for a widespread acceptance of slavery. One of the 'most shocking and sad results' of his research is that even prominent Islamic scholars contributed to the codification of slavery. 'That means that the Mosque was not neutral towards this evil', Chebel writes."

Die Welt 13.10.2008

Thomas Lindemann interviews the writerChristian Kracht who now lives in Buenos Aires: "I am surprised by how interesting it is here now. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has also moved here to marry an Argentinian model. Her father is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and the good lady goes by the name 'Analia'. (The photo shows the couple on their wedding day found here.)

Süddeutsche Zeitung 13.10.2008

"The Thracian is the grey mouse of antiquity," writes Ingo Petz. This is an image Bulgarian architect Jeko Tilev is out to change, with his plans bring the Thracian city of Seuthopolis, which lies at the bottom of a reservoir, back into the public eye. "He wants to raise the city to the surface of the water in a vast 20-metre cement cylinder which, in the model at least, looks elegant. It will then be accessible to visitors via lifts and boats. The whole thing will sit on a cement wall built on the base of the lake with a radius of 430 metres, and a length of 1,300 metres. The inner wall will be fitted with terraces and hanging gardens. To keep this artificial island aloft, the water level will have to be lowered by 2 percent. The vast construction will cost an estimated 100 million euros, and will take around a year a half to build. Tilew hopes that the island will then become a Unesco heritage sight."

Die Tageszeitung 14.10.2008

Dirk Knipphals welcomes the announcement that Uwe Tellkamp has won the German Book Prize for his GDR novel "The Tower". It is "this autumn's weightiest, most chameleonic and most brilliant book," he writes. "The lifeblood of Tellkamp's characters is art and culture. But if would be a mistake to see this as pure conservatism becuase the book's narrative construction is extremely modern, alone in the multiplicity of narrative perspectives." Read more about "The Tower" here and an English excerpt here.

Die Zeit 16.10.2008

Petra Reski writes a lengthy reportage about the Sicilian mafia hunter Giuseppe Linares: "Linares is so successful that he has to live his entire life with a bodyguard and no-one greets him on the street any more. He is also the numbe one target for a mafia pig head filled with faeces."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 17.10.2008

In Saudi Arabia, Ramadan has got off to a bizarre start, as Usahma Felix Darrah reports on the media page: "At the start of Ramadan, many Arabs were shocked when a prominent Saudi cleric announced that in view of the 'outrageous' programmes shown on a number of satellite channels, it would be permissible to kill the TV network owners. This statement by the chairmen of Saudi Arabia's top legal authorities, Sheik Saleh al-Luhaidan, is only the latest high point in an ongoing controversy over Arab Ramadan TV. Al-Luhaidan condemned the highly popular soap 'Noor' as 'full of moral degradation and as a 'war against virtue' and he forbade Muslims from watching the programme. The programme violates religious taboos by showing Muslim characters drinking wine and making love before marriage, and even putting one of the main characters through an abortion. (Find out more about 'Noor' in our Magazine Roundup)

The writerSteinunn Sigurdardottir, explains how Iceland became a victim of the finance crisis. "It is certainly doubtful whether the reaction of the Icelandic government and the central bank was sufficient to alleviate the situation. But the coup de grace for the Icelandic economy was delivered by Britain. Gordon Brown explained that Iceland was on the brink of bankruptcy and froze Icelandic bank assets in England, with the help of anti-terror laws. Friendly British diplomats attempted to de-escalate the warlike situation between the two countries, but the less diplomatic words of the president of the Icelandic central bank, were what caused the turnaround by guaranteeing British savers' deposits. In the meantime the British Prime Minister took great pleasure in using colonial warlord rhetoric towards crisis-hit Iceland, as if it was the Falklands of the North."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÂ¬â Â¬â about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more